History shows that balancing even one damage chart is hard, two is near impossible, that is just marketing speak. With the weapons we have right now, balancing is already much harder than in BF3 and 4, but at least not at BF1 levels.

I think the big issue is that modifying health or conversely damage multipliers is hard because TTK curves are non-linear. If the body part multipliers could be established as a function of range, then this becomes an easy math problem. Maybe I should tell DICE that...

History shows that balancing even one damage chart is hard, two is near impossible, that is just marketing speak. With the weapons we have right now, balancing is already much harder than in BF3 and 4, but at least not at BF1 levels.

I think the big issue is that modifying health or conversely damage multipliers is hard because TTK curves are non-linear. If the body part multipliers could be established as a function of range, then this becomes an easy math problem. Maybe I should tell DICE that...

Yeah this is a good point. Although I have to say that I find the changes they did to the stats in general pretty slick, because they increase consistency, which I like. Everything does the damage that it says on the tin, and headshots do double damage. Of course it is annoying that you get a lot of 99 hits, because a guy stepped out of the 10m range for a second, but the values are so consistent that instead of counting damage you could also count hits. This ties in well with their general "shoot where you aim"-approach, and their new take on spread decrease is a slight stroke of genius in my book.
What is getting harder, is adding weapons, especially automatic, with a different damage model. The SR-2 or MPX offered slightly higher max damage, but what it also did was extend the range of the weapon ever so slightly, too. Their streamlining also creates problems of scaling recoil and spread with the firerate of the weapon. Also their old dual spread-recoil system could have been used for the MGs as well.
I think their BFV system would have worked better in BF4, because we had a much more limited range of weaponry.

As someone said the current ttk is serverside, so I hope they revert the modifier changes to improve consistency again and adjust damage accordingly. I hate to say it, but more individual weapon balance seems also desperately needed, to at least make SMGs work, but I can not see them going back to a linear damage model.

Something slightly related to this topic to, is soemthing that I saw yesterday. I have rarely hit a person for more than 100 points of damage, which I sometimes assumed was due to hitting someone else, but I have also hit a guy for 112 points before he died, and I attributed this to how healing works in this game, as you can always heal for some points and if bullets can be delivered in one package, I suppose health can, too. Also yesterday I got a kill where three guys fired on a guy, I got the kill for doing 16 damage or something, another one for 82 and the other for another 18, clearly being over 100. I asked them to confirm their numbers, so I do not know if this a new thing or just something to be expected. So this could have potential effect on the TTK, too.

Indeed, this is the best news we've had since this change was announced. The only TTD that really ever bothered me was the time it takes to die to a sniper that I am actively hitting, which is one single frame, and this sure as heck didn't change that!

Speaking of lack of suppression, I made a suppression profile plot:

Based on my anecdotal experience, it seems reasonable that people can take 100 "suppression damage" before being "fully suppressed", and my guess is that the Machine Gunner Support role doubles this. (It also probably halves it on defense, but it's much harder to tell when you're fully suppressed than when your target is.) I know that in previous titles, the amount of support damage has been scaled based on the distance the round passes from the target's head, but I don't know how this features here.

IÂm very excited for the 1906 next week. Base RoF is 163, bullet velocity is 760 m/s, and itÂs always 2HK. It also gets a quick reload and fast bullets spec too. So itÂs a ZH without a mag spec (that you wouldnÂt use anyway), but the upgraded rate of fire for free and even faster bullet velo. It also has a bipod.

The more I think about it, this may just be a straight (minor) upgrade from the ZH, depending on some other details (such as the spec tree layout).